Many
years ago I had a most interesting lunch at an Indian restaurant. In India.
To come
right out with it, I enjoy Indian food; hit me with that tikka masala sauce or
a carefully prepared curry or any of the four thousand or so other items of
Indian chow and I’m a happy tandoori camper.
I
found it fascinating that this particular restaurant was a place of tolerance and
diversity. By that I mean the staff was
a sort of UN of different religions and beliefs, yet everyone seemed to be
working in a high degree of peace and harmony.
And
they were proud of it. When they learned
that the American customer was interested in such things, they came over to me,
singly or in pairs, enthusiastically telling me about their religion and how
well they got along with everyone else working in the restaurant.
There
were Hindus, of course, and Muslims, along with Sikhs and Buddhists and a few
glimmers of other faiths I wasn’t so familiar with. (There
was one chap who followed an unusual doctrine I did know a little something
about: Christianity.)
But
what blew me away was not just their pride in their beliefs but that they were
also eager to tell how impartial they all were and how they worked together and got along so well.
Reason
why this impressed me was that this all happened many years ago; in fact, I was
there as the long British raj was
coming to an end. For several centuries
the English had been involved in India –“the jewel in the crown” - and some
folks believed that if the British left the various religions would fatally tear each
other apart. From the tolerance and
cooperation I saw in that restaurant I was pretty sure that was not true.
How
wrong I was…
British
rule in the country came to an end just a few months after my meal at that
restaurant. Sort of as predicted, the
religions began tearing each other apart.
Earlier,
when I had been in Pakistan it was part of India; it was British. Now it was a different country, a Muslim land. Hindus by the many thousands had to get away,
to go south; just as many thousands of
Muslims felt they had to go north to a Muslim country.
So
many people ripped from their homes and forced to travel; it was the largest
migration in human history. The
resultant slaughter of the religious fighting was almost unbelievable. There were nearly a million casualties.
And
it is indeed a sad fact that this – possibly a thermonuclear version of it this
time - could begin again at any moment.
